Quasimidi Raven
Category: Products / synthesisers / modeling synthesisers
Added: 10-Oct-07 | Author: admin
New price: discontinued | S/H price: £400 - £500
Company Link: No company link
Quasimidi Raven
The Quasimidi Raven is often sneered at by synth purists, but it's a solid performance orientated keyboard workstation drawing on Quasimidi's previous and big selling product line & delivers a wide palette of sounds including TR style drums, classic synth, leads, pads, strings, washes & bass sounds as well as pianos & more. With it's built-in 16 part multi-timbrel sequencer you can compose entire songs in any electronic flavour using a Raven.
The sequencer can store up to 10 songs, each composed of up to 10 patterns & 99 steps, which sounds restrictive but these can be widely altered in the performance mode & each track type (kicks, snare, bass, lead, chords etc) has hundreds of preset motif patterns to choose from as building blocks for compositions. You can therefore think of the Raven as almost a 'Dance music' modern take on the early home-organ & accompanying drum-machine setups of the 1970's, and perhaps for that reason the Raven is sometimes mocked as not being a serious synth; but while it is clearly marketed as an all-in-one performance tool for the end user to make & perform dance music tunes, it can obviously function as a synth in its own right, providing one or more sounds within a composition & MIDI setup using other items of gear & then it's extensive palette of very much dance music orientated sounds really scores. Plenty of sounds and very good sounds they are too, complete with decent FX, an extremely advanced arpeggiator & the aforementioned 16 part sequencer.
Quasimidi's MASS sample waveform based synthesis differs from the DSP calculated waveform creation of other 'Virtual Analog' offerings of the late 90's, blending traditional S&S sample synthesis with FM & Additive wavetable techniques, but the results are really very good. SoS magazine in their review of the Raven opined: "The Quasimidi sound has lost none of its bass end, which remains unnervingly full when compared to other digital synths. You could be forgiven for thinking that some of these sounds are actually analogue."
Old Dancetech listing text
The Raven came along towards the end of Quasimidi's lifespan and was an all in one wunderkeyboard with sequencer, sounds, arpegiator, fx etc... You could bang out tunes on it with ease, and it was geared to work in a pattern based way with typical dancey, banging, euro styles. Not that it can't do more, but you will often hear it talked of as 'not a proper synth', with people knocking the unit for it's building-block approach to making music... but it was quite clever.
To sequence step stuff like drums for example, it has a 16-step grid like a Roland TR grid, but as you can see in the image, it's mapped with a graphic on the casing above the keys so that each key is a grid-step - The the keys become the 'steps' you press to input notes at those steps... quite nifty, you can see some of that in the video on this page.
So, dismissed as a toy by some and yet with hidden depths - The fact is tho, when teamed up with a typical home-studio computer studio it can yeild great results, and is a great unit for live gigging to rpoved your meat and potatoes sounds... I think the whole way to look at this synth is that they wanted to gratify a growing band of dance fans who desired to make the style of music in a fairly simple 'all in one' solution... and theres nothing wrong with that, but underneath lurkes an ability to be used with a pc rig, clocked and working as a multi-timbrel sound device.
It's got 512 3-osc sounds as standard which are based on waves stored in 6mb of sample ROM. Quasimidi released the RavenMAX card soon after, which came with tons of new sounds, expanding the unit's wave sample memory to 14mb in total. In essense it's got an 8 track sequencer which puts together songs from 'patterns' - 'patterns' being like a group of midi-parts in a software sequencer arrangement... drums, bass, synth etc 'parts' all go to make a 'pattern'. Patterns can then be strung into songs, transposed, etc. There's alot of emphasis in terms of fucntionality on playing parts & sequencing them & quantising etc.
Also it's more than a synth cos it's also a drumbox with a drum sequencer (and even more drums and percussion sounds if you can get the rarer exansion card) The Raven has all the usual classic dance/urban drumboxes sounds included and some old-skool box sounds too). The Raven also does a pallette of synth, basses, organs, etc, and arranges sounds into such groups for selection. It's also got that very comprehensive arpeggiator... Combine all that with 2 fx units and some creativity, and yes, it can do some great stuff!
Anyways, not to be overlooked. They arent too expensive due to them not having a 'real synth' old school appeal; built pretty well, wooden end cheeks etc, lol, nice fat sound, 2 mod wheels and all euro dance/trance sounds.. check it out.
Product Videos
How to use the Quasimidi Raven sequencer
A short example on how to make a few quick and simple patterns with the internal pattern sequencer o...
Product Manuals or Files
no user manual
Product Resources
Audio demo?
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Category: Products / synthesisers / modeling synthesisers
User Comments
Last added comment
Product: Quasimidi - Raven
Name: CHRISTIAN DIAZ
Email: Email supplied but hidden
mp3.com.au/majestic12
Activity: Professional
Date: 29-Jan-09
WELL WERE DO I START THE BEGENNING I GUESS .IN 1997 I HAD A MASSIVE RIG FOR LIVE GIGS SO WHEN I WAS IN CUSTOMS I HAD TO BARE THE MAN OPENING MY CASES AND WAVING MY DEVIL FISH 303 IN THE AIR. I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING THAT WOULD REPLACE THE ALL THE HASSLE AND I SEARCHED HIGH AND LOW .THEN I WAS IN GERMANY AND HELMUT (DJ HELL) WAS GOING ABOUT THIS RAVEN HE SAW IN A STUDIO SO WHEN I GOT HOME (OZ) I TRACKED ONE DOWN AND I FOUND HEAVEN . IT HAS ALL I NEEDED TO MAKE TUNES EXCEPT THE MANUAL IS TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN INTO JAPANISE INTO ENGLISH SO THERE IS ALOT MISSING FROM WHAT IT CAN REALLY DO SO AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF I WORKED HOW TO DO LIVE SHOWS THAT COULD GO FOR NEARLY 4 HOURS ALL FROM ONE MACHINE .AS THERE IS NO INSTRUCTION MANUAL IN HOW TO DO THIS I WILL TELL YOU .FIRST WHEN YOU ARE MAKING SONGS IN SEQUENCES MODE MAKES SURE ONE SEQUENCES IS A WHOLE SONG AS YOU HAVE 10 SEQUENCES PER BANK YOU HAVE 10 SONGS PER BANK TIMES TEN BANKS 100 SONGS SO BEING CREATIVE IS IMPORTANT .IN THE FINAL SONG MIX DOWN EDIT YOUR SEQENCES AS ONE SONG AND MIX YOUR SONGS IN WITH FILLS OR DROP OUTS,IN USING KICKS OR WHAT EVER YOU WANT . ONE THING TO REMEMBER YOU CAN ONLY USE ABOUT 70% OF THE MEMORY BE 4 IT CRASHES AND YOU CANNOT GET YOUR SONGS BACK NO MATTER WHAT YOU SMOKE .TRY TO USE IN BUILT PATTERNS AS WELL THERE ARE 1200 WITH THE MAX CHIP AND THE SOUNDS ARE ALL EDIT FRIENDLY AS WELL AS ENDLESS THIS WILL SAFE YOU LOTS OF MEMORY THE STEREO PLUGS ARE A BUMMER BUT YOU CAN HAVE CANNONS INSTALLED. I HAVE HAD MANY GIRLFRIENDS BUT I ONLY HAVE ONE RAVEN AND IF THEY LET IT WILL BE IN COFFIN AS WELL .I HAVE TOURED FOR NEARLY 10 YEARS ALL OVER THE WORLD WITH HER AND NO PROBLEMS AT ALL WITH 25 ALBUMS ON THE NET I CAN MAKES MANY STYLES OF MUSIC FROM ONE MACHINE AND THE ONLY THING THAT STOPS ME IS MY IMAGINATION FROM MAKING MORE ,IF IT HAD A IN BUILT SAMPLER I WOULD MARRY HER BUT IT DOESNT SO I WONT . IF YOU HAVE ANY MORE QUESTIONS CONTACT ME AT MAJESTIC12RECORDS@HOTMAIL.COM YOU WILL CAN GO WRONG
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'Quasimidi Raven'
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